Today the program compiles and runs from the same ANSI C source files on a variety of platforms. Markus Gille and Ernst Heinz are responsible for fine-tuning the evaluation function and databases and Peter Gillagasch still maintains the chess engine. During the World Championships, Darkthought will run on the most powerful DEC Alpha workstation available.

1997

DarkThought is a bitboard-based chess program developed at the University of Karlsruhe that has successfully participated in all world championships since 1995. On a 500MHz DEC Alpha-21164a with 128MB RAM, DarkThought routinely reaches speeds of 200K nps in the middlegame while peaking at over 650K nps in the endgame.

1999

DarkThought is a full-blown 64-bit chess program based on the bitboard technology. It was developed at the Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) and has successfully participated in all ICCA world championships since 1995. On a 767MHz KryoTech Alpha-21164a with 256MB RAM, DarkThought easily reaches speeds of 350K nps in the middle game while peaking at over 1M nps in the endgame.